New Scientist Tech’s recent article, Intelligent Sensors Watch for Impending Flood, highlights the use of a small dedicated grid comprised of CPUs on
the sensors themselves communicating via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Greg Pawrocki points out in his blog though, that this grid probably doesn’t meet one of the more accepted deffinitions of a grid, Ian Foster’s 2002 three point checklist from his article “What is a Grid“.

Lately web hosters have begun marketing themselves as grid as well. Clearly, we’re seeing a trend. IMHO, grid computing no longer belongs to the HPC academic community that developed it. The mass market is asking for it. If that’s true, then we need a new definition for grid - a new checklist. Ian’s work was insightful at the time, but a lot has happened in four years.

Over the course of the last 25 years I’ve watched several times as new technologies were introduced without regard for the investments already in place. Their fate was always predictable - failure.

As an example, consider ATM. Once hailed as the network of the future, ATM failed miserably in the market. It was complicated enough in it’s native form that simple implementations took months of planning. However, probably more importantly, it was a nightmare to implement in conjunction with an existing IP network. For this reason it never really had a chance.

The converse is also true, however. Technologies that fail outright or only succeed in a niche can flourish if brought to market in a manner that leverages existing investments. Apple’s iPod certainly wasn’t the first digital music player, but it was the first to come with a legal means of accessing existing music libraries. We all know what happened next.

GRIDtoday contributing author Greg Nawrocki recently wrote an article entitled Building the Perfect ‘Grid Sandwich’ in which he acknowledges that “The majority of grid implementations and even middleware solutions take the bottom-up approach, building the network and associated infrastructure and hoping applications are built that will utilize these services.” This is all too true, and as a result grid adoption has been slow to break beyond it’s HPC roots. Unfortunately, Greg continues in a predictably linear fashion “we need to concentrate on the top-down approach and actually build, or repurpose, applications that take advantage of potential Grid infrastructures.”

Building and “repurposing” applications is an immense investment. One that isn’t likely to spur adoption beyond those proven to have an acceptable ROI.

Of course, if you’re reading this you’re probably familiar with AppLogic and know that building or repurposing applications isn’t necesary anymore. Instead, what was required, and now exists, was a grid OS designed from the ground up to run existing applications. With this approach, Greg’s desire for a “Grid-enabled version of the Apache Web server” has already been fulfilled. In fact, AppLogic makes grid computing so transparent that many folks are already using Apache on grids without even knowing it.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there’s no place for software tailored to run on grids. However, that market is a niche and will always remain so.

I belive that for grid computing to achieve mass adtoption we need to leave the concept of “grid enabled” software behind and adopt the grid to the software people already use.

I’ve been priveleged in my career to work with some spectacular engineers who time and again have produced ground breaking technology for me to launch. From the first stackable switches, through the first L3 switches, and now AppLogic they’ve placed me on the front lines.

It’s no revelation that over the last few years blogging’s influence in getting a technology into the market has grown dramatically. Bloggers get news out faster and often with more real commentary than the traditional press who tend to rely more and more on vendor provided material. In fact, most good writers now have their own blogs. However, if you’re on the push-end of the process the blogoshpere’s fuidity and inherent noise level makes understanding the traction of your ideas difficult.

As an example I recently found a blog post about AppLogic that suggested we required customers to use modified versions of Apache, JBoss etc. The blogger concluded we were toast for this reason. Of course, we don’t require special versions of software, but where did the information come from. After searching a few links and sending a couple emails I found the source. Someone had read an article but hadn’t used AppLogic, seen our demo or even visited our site. Still, he used AppLogic to make a point in his blog and the missinformation spread.

Enter BuzzLogic. This SaaS offering combines an intelligent crawler, a database and mathematical analysis to track ideas through the internet. Instead of merely looking to see how many links a blogger gets, the system actually tracks how many folks that link later write about the topic. A stronger test of influence. Map this over time, separate the results by topic, and differentiate blogs from media and corporate and you have a LOT of data to work with. And, IMHO, a powerful tool.

As Dave Churbuck from Lenovo notes, BuzzLogic is also valuable for tracking customer satisfaction online. Until I found his post I hadn’t considered that use, but I absolutely plan to follow his lead.

BuzzLogic is still in beta, but their demo is impressive and I’m anxious to get my hands on it. If the product is as good as the demo, BuzzLogic will become an indisspensible tool for launching new technologies.